


Ring

by Haely_Potter



Series: Bending the Universe [3]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Hopeful Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 16:25:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haely_Potter/pseuds/Haely_Potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor has a ring he never takes off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ring

At first Donna doesn't notice his ring, too busy trying to get to her wedding on time, not until he gives her the bio damper as they sit on the edge. "So… this friend you lost… was she your wife?"

The Doctor looks down at his ring, knowing he should take it off so that there'd be no chance of losing it but he can't make himself do it. It's a constant reminder of her, that he needs her, wants her there, inside the TARDIS with him. Slowly he nods. "Got married a while back on a different planet, wanted to follow the human tradition of exchanging rings, so we came here and applied for a marriage license and got married. Didn't even tell her mother. But that's enough about me, what do Santa robo-scavengers want with you?"

To Martha he deliberately shows his ring to ward off her advances. He will never love again, especially not a human. It doesn't really help. Martha is just all the more pushy, offering comfort in an effort to get closer. When he is human, Rose is his deceased wife and despite Nurse Redfern's best attempts, he can't forget her. Jack notices the ring right way and slaps him on the back, teasing him about being domesticated, then asking about her, and the battle of Canary Wharf. Soon as the Doctor knows professor Yana is the Master, he slips the ring off his finger, because the Master would take perverse delight in destroying it, like he glories in destroying Earth. For his funeral the Doctor already has his ring back on. Then Jack and Martha leave and he understands their lives aren't tide to his like Rose's was.

Then Donna comes back and he can talk to her a little more freely, she'd seen him just after he'd said goodbye to Rose. He'd never had a lower point in his life, not even right after the Time War, but Donna had kept him sane and alive, as it turns out in that parallel world that gets created around Donna.

But Rose is back and so are the Daleks and the whole of creation is in danger and he gets shot and delays regenerating and Donna accidentally creates a human time lord biological metacrisis. One that is him while he isn't him in return. And he knows what he has to do, even if it rips his hearts out of his chest and makes the universe dance jig on them.

His song is ending and he regenerates but the holes where his hearts used to be are still there, gaping. The metaphorical blood flow in the metaphorical wound has stopped and it's partly scabbed over but nowhere near healed, not scarred over, not numb.

Happily married Ponds are salt over the metaphorical wound, and River Song is the infection that took hold. She ignores his ring (that is now constricting but he wouldn't dream of taking it off ever again) and eventually, couple centuries later, he marries her to save the universe. She asks him to take off the ring but he refuses, glaring at her until she leaves him alone, content on thinking of him as a remarried widower. (Not a widower, never a widower, she's so wonderfully alive, will be until his dying day because he can't hear the news of her passing, can't stumble across her grave like he eventually does with the Ponds.)

Clara Oswald, the governess, asks him point blank where his wife is when they first meet and the Doctor lies that she's come down with a cold and had to stay home. It's easier than explaining that his first wife is dead with the rest of his people, his second wife locked away in a parallel world and his third wife, whom he is fond of, has been dead almost as long as he's known her.

Clara Oswin Oswald, the nanny, asks him about it when he's trying to get her inside the TARDIS, that if his wife likes him going around, tempting other women into his snogging booth. The Doctor doesn't have time to answer and the topic is forgotten, until Clara brings it up again after saving him from the pocket universe, all because the TARDIS voice interface is still her, will always be her.

Eventually Clara sees their whole story inside his time stream, sees the now scabbed over wounds covering his hearts, sees how he still likes to probe at them sometimes, how River, the one who proclaimed herself the Doctor's wife, still poisons his memory of her, making him feel as if he's betraying her somehow.

She doesn't see the end of the story, the Doctor retrieves her from his time stream before she consciously processes future events, but she does see a flash of blond hair just round the corner and the glint of the ring in the very end and knows the Doctor will love Rose Tyler to the end of his days.


End file.
